Nov 01

Today’s News 1st November 2024

  • State Department Threatens Georgia With 'Consequences' Amid Rigged Election Claims
    State Department Threatens Georgia With ‘Consequences’ Amid Rigged Election Claims

    Authored by Connor Freeman via The Libertarian Institute,

    The State Department and the European Union are demanding Tbilisi repeal “anti-democratic” legislation and investigate election “irregularities” respectively after the Georgian Dream Party won this weekend’s parliamentary elections. Georgian leaders including Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze and President Salome Zourabichvili are at odds, with Zourabichvili accusing Kobakhidze’s party of winning a “total fraud” election.

    Per the official tally, Georgian Dream won 54% of the vote, with multiple opposition parties earning between 3-11%. Georgian Dream will form the country’s next government as they now hold a minimum of 90 out of the national parliament’s 150 seats. However, four opposition parties which favor integration with the EU are refusing to participate in the new legislature, deeming the election stolen, and accusing the ruling party of pushing Georgia towards a pro-Russia direction. President Zourabichvili called for protests and vowed she will not recognize the plebiscite’s results.

    Tens of thousands of Georgians protested for hours outside parliament on Monday night, the demonstrations reportedly ended with no plans for further action but dispersed peacefully. The Georgian government and electoral commission have dubbed the election free and fair.

    State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller threatened Georgia with “consequences” before adding his demands. Miller characterized the election as having taken place within an “environment shaped by the ruling party’s policies including misuse of public resources, vote buying and voter intimidation.”

    He made clear the path Georgia is taking does not bode well for its future in America’s orbit, “We encourage Georgia’s governing officials to consider the relationship they want with the Euro-Atlantic community rather than strengthening policies that are praised by authoritarians.”

    Finally Miller, speaking for a government which has extensively meddled in Georgian elections including staging a coup in the 2003 Rose Revolution, warned “We do not rule out further consequences if the Georgian government’s direction does not change.” He then insisted that Tbilisi begin “withdrawing and repealing anti-democratic legislation.”

    The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe praised Georgia’s voter participation, substantial presence of citizen and party observers, as well as the diversity of ballot choices during the election. OSCE observers “found the legal framework to be adequate for holding democratic elections.” Although they also accused the ruling party of exploiting an “already uneven playing field,” and claimed there were instances of intimidation, coercion, and pressure being put on voters including public sector employees.

    EU Council chief Charles Michel is calling on the relevant authorities in Georgia to “swiftly, transparently, and independently investigate and adjudicate electoral irregularities and allegations thereof.” He added, “These alleged irregularities must be seriously clarified and addressed.”

    Western governments are condemning Georgia’s ‘law on transparency of foreign influence,’ which requires agencies to register as “agents of foreign influence” if they are operating within Georgia and foreign sources account for over 20% of their funding. Georgia’s parliamentary speaker signed the bill into law after it was vetoed by President Zourabichvili earlier this year. The law operates similarly to the US Foreign Agents Registration Act.

    The West is also in an uproar against Georgian laws banning gender reassignment surgery, gay marriage, and so called LGBTQ “propaganda” including PRIDE-style events along with certain books and films. Although, polling shows significant public disapproval in Georgia of same-sex marriages.

    Last month, a senior US official told Voice of America, the American state-funded media outlet, that Washington is preparing sanctions on former Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili, Georgian Dream’s influential founder, over his opposition to Tbilisi joining NATO and the EU.

    An analysis by Ian Proud published by Responsible Statecraft makes the case that the ruling party’s victory can be explained not by election rigging but as a popular response to various economic and immigration crises.

    Proud notes the uneven trade relationship the Caucasian country maintains with the EU since signing the EU Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement ten years ago. EU states benefit from robust exports in Georgia while purchasing four times less Georgian imports. The trade balance is more even with the Eurasian States, although they too export 1.8 times more than they import.

    At the same time, the Washington-led proxy war with Moscow in Ukraine is both funded and championed by the EU. The war has caused an immigration crisis in Georgia with nearly 90,000 people emigrating from Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine between 2022 and 2023. This has led to a surging unemployment rate of over 26%, while housing prices are up 35% and rent prices have risen as much as 50%.

    In 2008, at NATO’s Bucharest Summit, Brussels announced both Tbilisi and Kiev would one day join the Washington-led military bloc which has been mired in disastrous wars in the Balkans, North Africa, and Central Asia. The admission of both states to the alliance is viewed in the Kremlin as a major national security threat and provoked Russia’s invasions of both Georgia sixteen years ago and now Ukraine.

    As Scott Horton, the Libertarian Institute’s director, has detailed, the now jailed former president Mikheil Saakashvili, the victor of the US-backed Rose Revolution, “was incentivized to take bigger risks due to the Bucharest Declaration of America’s intent to bring them into the NATO alliance just four months before, U.S. military support and vague security assurances the Bush government had given his government that spring.

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    Saakashvili launched an attack on the breakaway province of South Ossetia in the southern Caucuses Mountains, then enjoying full autonomy and protection by Russian peacekeepers under a deal that had been brokered by [the] European Union… The Russians, suffering casualties in the initial assault, quickly struck back, destroying Georgia’s invading force and securing South Ossetia’s independence from Georgian rule.”

    Barack Obama’s administration orchestrated a coup and overthrew the government in Kiev during the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Subsequently during the Donald Trump years, the White House armed Ukraine’s military, including Neo Nazi militias ingratiated in the National Guard. Concurrently, Kiev entrenched ties with US special operations forces and the CIA as it waged a war against ethnic Russian separatists in the Donbas region.

    Under the current White House, as tensions mounted over the Donbas, the erstwhile USSR state became a de facto NATO member as Washington eschewed diplomacy with the Kremlin, refusing to discuss rescinding Ukraine’s invitation for membership with the alliance, culminating in Russia’s 2022 invasion.

    Tyler Durden
    Fri, 11/01/2024 – 02:00

  • Chinese Hackers Compromised Multiple Canadian Government Networks For Years, Stole Info: Security Agency
    Chinese Hackers Compromised Multiple Canadian Government Networks For Years, Stole Info: Security Agency

    Authored by Andrew Chen via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    Cyber threat actors from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have been implicated in multiple breaches of networks associated with federal government agencies and departments, according to a report from the national cybersecurity agency.

    CSE chief Caroline Xavier appears at the Foreign Interference Commission in Ottawa on Sept. 26, 2024. The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld

    “Over the past four years, at least 20 networks associated with Government of Canada agencies and departments have been compromised by PRC cyber threat actors,” said the National Cyber Threat Assessment 2025-2026, released Oct. 30 by the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security.

    The centre identifies China as the top threat actor targeting Canada, noting that its cyber operations are “second to none” in scale, technique, and ambition. Beijing’s objectives include espionage, intellectual property theft, malign influence, and transnational repression, the centre says. 

    While the report highlights China’s hacking of 20 federal government networks in the past four years, information elsewhere in the report shows that Chinese hackers have had access to multiple government networks longer than that. The report says that Chinese agents have compromised Canadian government networks over the past five years, collecting communications and other valuable information.

    “While all known federal government compromises have been resolved, it is very likely that the actors responsible for these intrusions dedicated significant time and resources to learn about the target networks,” the report reads.

    At a press conference on Oct. 30, Caroline Xavier, chief of the Canadian Communications Security Establishment (CSE), would not  comment on the details of the breaches, but said mitigation measures had been “effective.”

    “The key message for us—when there are incidents that occur—is really being focused on ensuring [we] minimize the impact to the government department that may have been compromised. And that is exactly where our focus has been,” she told reporters. “We do feel that the measures were taken to be able to mitigate any of the risks, and to address the incidents in an effective manner.”

    The cyber centre is hosted within CSE, Canada’s electronic spy agency, which is responsible for collecting signals intelligence and defending against cyberattacks.

    China Targets

    In addition to federal agencies, provincial and territorial governments are also seen as valuable targets for Beijing, the report said, noting that these governments hold decision-making power over regional trade and commerce, including the extraction of critical minerals and other natural resources.

    Xavier said this targeting indicates Beijing is a “sophisticated, consistent, and persistent actor,” and that Canada needs to address the threat with a more comprehensive approach.

    “We have work to do as a nation, to continue to work, in particular with the provinces, territories, indigenous communities, because we recognize that we’re all vulnerable, or we all could be vulnerable, and we really want to continue to raise Canada’s cyber resilience,” she said.

    The cyber centre also echoed previous reports from various human rights groups, warning that Beijing’s transnational repression has primarily targeted five specific communities, referred to by the regime as the “five poisons.” These include Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, Tibetans, supporters of Taiwanese independence, and pro-democracy activists.

    “PRC actors very likely facilitate transnational repression by monitoring and harassing these groups online and tracking them using cyber surveillance,” the report said. “For example, the PRC has been publicly linked to cyber espionage operations against the Uyghur minority group, including members living in Canada, using spear phishing emails and spyware.”

    Other Countries Named

    Other state-backed threat actors highlighted in the cyber centre report include Russia, Iran, and India.

    Russia’s cyber operations are characterized as “a multi-layered strategy” that combines conventional cyber espionage and computer network attacks with disinformation. Its primary goal is to enhance Russia’s global status while undermining democratic institutions in Canada and among its allies.

    A specific case cited in the report involves a breach detected by Microsoft in January, where a Russian state-sponsored cyber threat actor known as Midnight Blizzard accessed the company’s cloud-based enterprise email service.

    The group infiltrated correspondence between Microsoft and government officials in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Initially, the actors sought information about Russia itself, but later used personal data and credentials from the emails to gain access to Microsoft customer systems.

    Meanwhile, the report said Iran has been expanding its cyberattacks to western countries amid its ongoing military conflict with Israel.

    “Iran has taken advantage of its back-and-forth cyber confrontation with Israel to improve its cyber espionage and offensive cyber capabilities and hone its information campaigns, which it is now almost certainly deploying against targets in the West,” the report said.

    During the press conference, Xavier also identified India as an “emerging threat” to Canada.

    “India very likely uses its cyber program to advance its national security imperatives, including espionage, counterterrorism, and the country’s efforts to promote its global status and counter narratives against India and the Indian government,” the report said.

    Citing her recent testimony before the foreign interference inquiry, Xavier noted India could potentially “flex those cyber threat actions against Canadians” amid ongoing diplomatic tensions.

    Earlier this month, Canada expelled six Indian diplomats, prompting a reciprocal move by India, which also expelled six Canadian diplomats. This dispute arose after the RCMP announced its investigation into criminal activities allegedly involving “agents of the Government of India.” 

    ‘Ever-Present’ Threat

    The Centre for Cyber Security says Canada has entered a new era in which cyber threats are “ever present.”

    “Canadians will increasingly feel the impact of cyber incidents that have cascading and disruptive effects on their daily lives,” the report said.

    The centre says the threat has expanded as Canadians increasingly rely on online platforms and digital technologies to go about their lives.

    “These systems record and process vast amounts of data about us, often over poorly secured or untrustworthy digital networks,” it said.

    Aside from the threats from hostile state actors, the centre notes that the cybercrime business model is “underpinned by flourishing online marketplaces” where leaked data is sold along with cyber tools for criminals.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 23:55

  • "A Breach Of Protocol": White House Overrode Stenographers, Altered "Garbage" Transcript
    “A Breach Of Protocol”: White House Overrode Stenographers, Altered “Garbage” Transcript

    In a mad scramble to cover for President Biden calling half of the country “garbage,” White House press officials altered the official transcript, overriding official stenographers who objected to the alterations, the Associated Press reports.

    According to the pre-altered transcript, Biden said “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters — his — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American.”

    However White House press office added an apostrophe, reading “supporter’s” rather than “supporters,” in order to peddle the falsehood that Biden was criticizing comic Tony Hinchcliffe, who referred to the US island territory of Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.”

    The change was made after the press office “conferred with the president,” according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters.

    The supervisor, in the email, called the press office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.” -AP

    According to the email, the press office demanded that stenographers quickly produce a transcript of Biden’s call with Latino activists to discuss Hinchicliffe’s comments, while Biden’s social media team posted on X that he was not calling all Trump supporters garbage – and that he was specifically referring to the “hateful rhetoric about Puerto Rico spewed by Trump’s supporter at his Madison Square Garden rally.”

    The two-person stenography team on duty that evening, a “typer” and a “proofer” said that any edits to the official transcript would have to be approved by their supervisor, the head of the stenographer’s office – who was unavailable. Because of this, the White House press office went ahead and published an altered transcript on the White House website and distributed it to the press and social media in a mad scramble.

    The supervisor did not like that…

    “If there is a difference in interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,” wrote the supervisor, adding “Our Stenography Office transcript — released to our distro, which includes the National Archives — is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.“

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    The supervisor, a career White House employee, raised concerns about the alteration in an email to White House communications director Ben LaBolt, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and other officials.

    “Regardless of urgency, it is essential to our transcripts’ authenticity and legitimacy that we adhere to consistent protocol for requesting edits, approval, and release,” he wrote.

    The alteration was done as the White House scrambled to respond to a cascade of press inquiries over Biden’s comments – which completely upstaged Kamala Harris’ closing argument speech outside the White House.

    As journalist Michael Shellenberger points out, it was likely illegal.

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    Biden’s comment was a gift to the Trump campaign, which immediately capitalized on it – fundraising off the quote, while Trump himself held a photo op inside a garbage truck on Wednesday.

    Harris also moved to quickly distance herself from Biden’s comments, telling reporters “I strongly disagree with any criticism of people based on who they vote for.”

    Meanwhile, House Republicans have been discussing launching an investigation into the fabrication – with House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik, R-(NY), and House Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer, R-(KY), on Wednesday accusing the White House of “releasing a false transcript” of Biden’s remarks, and called on White House counsel Ed Siskel to retain documents and internal communications related to Biden’s remarks and the transcript.

    “White House staff cannot rewrite the words of the President of the United States to be more politically on message,” the lawmakers wrote, noting that it may have been a violation of the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

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    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 23:30

  • After Godwin’s Law, Dems May Try One Last 'Get Trump' Gambit On Election Day
    After Godwin’s Law, Dems May Try One Last ‘Get Trump’ Gambit On Election Day

    Authored by Ben Sellers via Headline USA,

    Apart from getting booed by Beyoncé fans and heckled by Hamas supporters, nothing could have been more pathetic than the Kamala Harris campaign’s pivot back to Bidenesque fearmongering in the desperate final stretch of the 2024 election.

    An Iranian video imagines an assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump while golfing at his Florida resort. / IMAGE: @basedmikelee via Twitter

    The Adolf Hitler trope now being deployed by Democrats is so overwrought that, since 1991, it has had its own special name in online culture: Godwin’s law.

    And yes, the eponymous law’s creator, Mike Godwin—a former senior fellow at the R Street Institute and contributing editor at Reason magazine— has often addressed, in response to media inquiries, whether former President Donald Trump deserves a special-exception rider.

    “My name gets cited in a lot of these discussions. And of course my ears are burning,” Godwin explained in a 2018 op-ed for the newly neutral Los Angeles Times.

    “It hasn’t mattered that I’ve explained GL countless times,” Godwin continued. “Some critics on the left have blamed me for (supposedly) having shut down valid comparisons to the Holocaust or previous atrocities.”

    The problem the Democrats have is that they sought precisely the same carve-out for many other Republicans: Ronald Reagan, John McCain, Mitt Romney, George W. Bush and, of course, Dick Cheney. Four have since become staunch Trump critics, and one is now actively campaigning for the Democrats.

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    “They’ve been saying that about Trump for years,” observed conservative pundit Megyn Kelly during a recent interview with Bill Maher. “They’ve been saying that about Republican candidates for years. … If you are at all center or center-right, you are used to having your candidate of choice completely demonized.”

    As Godwin clarified, his law was never intended to suggest that all comparisons to Hitler and the Nazi regime were spurious—only that most were.

    Republicans have countered the constant barrage of ad hominem attacks by pointing to the very valid ways in which the Democrats have, themselves, become the party of anti-liberal, authoritarian values, using their Trump Derangement Syndrome as justification to act on their worst impulses by shutting down all criticism and debate, while pursuing a Stalin-inspired “ends justifies the means” approach to politics.

    “I saw the party that used to have courageous voices and leaders, calling for peace, now becoming the party of warmongers,” said newly red-pilled Republican Tulsi Gabbard at a rally Saturday in Charlotte, N.C.

    “It has become the party of war,” the one-time Democratic presidential candidate added. “It used to be the party of working people.”

    INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY

    The resulting death spiral has left the Democratic Party in a condition where, without significant reform, it is no longer compatible with the precepts of democracy because its ideas, when it bothers presenting any, are so far on the fringe that they are rejected by the public.

    They have, instead, fallen back on astroturfing, gaslighting and importing new voters through a complex ploy that involves simultaneously undermining U.S. border security and election-integrity laws, while actively attacking any efforts by the states to address their negligence.

    Although they have set themselves up with the capabilities to steal any election, relying on both traditional ballot-harvesting methods and technological manipulation of equipment, their one vulnerability could be a landslide election in which, given the loss of credibility in the media and many government institutions, the American public outright fails to accept a fraudulent outcome.

    While polls still suggest a tight race, many other bellwethers now indicate a potential Trump blowout, at least in the Electoral College.

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    With Trump notably leading polls in the critical battleground of Pennsylvania, even Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., recently acknowledged the GOP nominee’s strong position to hold the Keystone State, according to a New York Times interview.

    Trump need only secure his 2020 states, along with Pennsylvania and Georgia, to reclaim the presidency, with four additional “swing states”—Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada—only bolstering his advantage.

    As of Sunday, the latest polling averages from RealClear Politics indicated that Trump had narrow leads in all of them. He had a 0.1% lead nationally.

    By contrast, on Oct. 27, 2020, President Joe Biden reflected a 7.4% lead nationally. Hillary Clinton, who lost to Trump in 2016, had a 5.6% advantage.

    IMPLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

    Trump’s success, moreover, in clinching key minority demographics creates an optical problem for Democrats, who can no longer use the fig leaf of “voting rights” as a pretense to undermine election integrity.

    Democrats who disfranchise voters in the black and Hispanic communities now risk losing them permanently and incurring the same level of minority-driven anger and outrage against them that they weaponized against Trump during the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots.

    Most worrisome of all for Democrats may be that in Arizona, Nevada and North Carolina, early voting indicated that more Republicans had turned out as of Friday, Oct. 25, according to Bloomberg.

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    Three other battleground states—Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin—do not track party registration for early voting, suggesting Trump may be leading there, as well.

    This trend could further explode the narrative pushed during recent election cycles that Republicans simply waited until Election Day and were bested by Democrats’ early get-out-the-vote initiatives.

    If Trump is leading by a notable margin even going into Nov. 5 and Republicans continue to turn out at higher levels, there will be no plausible deniability for Democrats (and some corrupt GOP election officials) to delay releasing the results as they continue to scrounge up late-surfacing ballots in blue enclaves such as Arizona’s Maricopa County and Nevada’s Clark County, both of which have previously pulled last-minute reversals in 2020 and 2022.

    Having already tipped their hand to their tactics, all eyes will be watching to see whether they have the temerity to engage in what could be deemed nothing less than a seditious conspiracy.

    DESPERATE MEASURES

    With all other options exhausted, Democrats’ only hope now may be to drive massive turnout on Election Day itself. But that is a task not easily accomplished. Undoubtedly, they would need some sort of precipitating event to rally any remaining voters to the polls.

    What could it be? Here are a few possibilities that they might still pull off with just over a week remaining.

    • Escalation of war/act of terrorism:

    “I have not permitted myself, gentlemen, to conclude that I am the best man in the country; but I am reminded, in this connection, of a story of an old Dutch farmer, who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams,”’ wrote Abraham Lincoln in a June 1864 letter making his case for reelection.

    The axiom has led other presidents, while politically flailing, to try to “wag the dog” by using war as a means to drive patriotic sentiment. In the Biden–Harris regime, while the patriotism may not be present, the anxiety of a foreign attack is still a powerful tool for manipulation.

    Both China and Iran have made clear their preference for the current administration—of which Kamala Harris would be, at best, an extension—over Trump’s “America First” presidency. A false flag attack on Ukraine to stir up anti-Russian sentiment is another possibility. Trump has pledged to end the war there even before taking office.

    • Intel psy-op

    We are all too familiar with the intelligence community’s role in fomenting violence at events like the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protest and the Jan. 6, 2021 “Save America” rally. Perhaps the Harris campaign’s decision to feature them as a focal point in its closing argument is not so much an act of desperation but portention.

    There are several signals indicating that there may be a heightened presence of election-meddling FBI operatives and others on-site at polling places, who are specifically tasked with monitoring MAGA. Might the goal be to instigate some sort of unrest during the election as a weapon of mass distraction?

    • Executive Order 14019

    The Biden administration has been abjectly dishonest about many things, but its unusually opaque approach to President Joe Biden’s March 2021 edict has long raised suspicions that it could weaponize the entire federal bureaucracy as a de-facto ballot-harvesting operation for Democrats.

    In keeping with the blueprints of anti-American subversive Saul Alinsky, the Left has sought to pre-emptively accuse the Trump campaign of a nefarious plot to reshape the government through talking points about the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Yet, Executive Order 14019 could be everything that it accuses Project 2025 of being and then some. The only problem is that the lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell just how Democrats intend to use this.

    • Presidential death/health crisis

    The Democrats and their deep-state allies have failed, thus far, in killing Trump, and to do so now would undoubtedly turn him into one of the greatest martyrs in U.S. history. JD Vance would coast to victory in a landslide, and with trusted college pal Vivek Ramaswamy at his side, he would set up the GOP for generations of political dominance.

    Yet, assuming Biden hasn’t been actively trying to torpedo the Harris campaign, he might be persuaded to step aside early due to a health emergency, installing the current veep as the incumbent, which would allow her to finish the final stretch with images being sworn in by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, shoring up the identity politics vote. It would, of course, leave little time for her to actually implement any policies that would sour voters further against her.

    Although Biden has recently indicated the need to “lock up” Trump—politically, he claims—Trump shrewdly hinted that he might be open to considering a presidential pardon for Hunter Biden, which could prove to be a powerful bargaining chip.

    Nonetheless, there is another president who could similarly stir up superficial sentiment at the last minute. Centenarian Jimmy Carter may, in fact, already be dead.

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    Barring further proof of life, one might be hard-pressed to believe that Carter—his mouth agape, and his skin appearing jaundiced or discolored as he lay in state at his 100th birthday celebration—still inhabits this mortal plane.

    However, maintaining the illusion is necessary, for now, since Carter already cast an early ballot for Kamala Harris, which would be invalidated, in theory, if he were to die before Election Day.

    Carter’s passing, followed by a prompt cremation, could be announced next Tuesday as voters in Georgia are heading to the polls, throwing in to disarray a must-win state that Trump appears to have locked in.

    • Literally locking Trump up

    This risky move may backfire, as all the earlier lawfare actions taken against Trump only helped to further bolster his popular support due to backlash. Nonetheless, the psychological impact of having their candidate in detention could cast enough doubt to keep some Republicans home, and would certainly motivate Democrats.

    As it stands, corrupt New York Judge Juan Merchan has pushed back Trump’s sentencing in his porn-star case to Nov. 26. The GOP leader also still remains under gag order in the D.C. trial led by dubiously appointed special counsel Jack Smith, whom Trump recently called a “scoundrel.”

    Smith and his accomplice, D.C. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, might unseal additional accusations to bait Trump into a response of some kind that could violate the order and land him in the gulag with countless other Jan. 6 detainees.

    Ben Sellers is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/realbensellers.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 23:05

  • South Korea's Chip Output Drops For First Time In 14 Months Amid Slowdown At Samsung
    South Korea’s Chip Output Drops For First Time In 14 Months Amid Slowdown At Samsung

    Concerns over the stability of the artificial intelligence bubble intensified this week. 

    Advanced Micro Devices released a disappointing earnings report on Tuesday, revealing slower-than-expected growth in AI sales. Adding to the uncertainty, Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest smartphone manufacturer, reported overnight about uninspiring demand for advanced chips in mobile devices and PCs. 

    The largest takeaway from Samsung’s third-quarter earnings report was an underwhelming performance in the company’s chip division, posting a surprise drop from the previous quarter. At the same time, overall profit was marginally higher than Wall Street estimates. Also, it saw smartphone sales slowing by the end of the year and only increasing by about 1% in 2025, despite the hype surrounding AI-enabled smartphones and other handheld devices. 

    In addition to company-level developments, new data from South Korea’s chip manufacturing base shows that production fell in September for the first time in 14 months—yet more troubling signs showing the AI boom cools. 

    More from Bloomberg:

    Nationwide semiconductor production slid 3% in September, a sharp reversal after they gained 11% a month earlier, according to data released Thursday by the government statistical office. The growth in shipments also slowed to 0.7% from 17% in August.

    Source: Bloomberg 

    Still, inventory levels showed stockpiles continue to be worked through at a rapid clip, as they declined 41.5% from a year earlier in September. The numbers paint a picture of an industry that may be cooling gradually as demand for memory chips peaks out.

    South Korea’s chip production is viewed as a proxy for global chip demand because these components are used in a wide range of electronics, from smartphones to servers to automobiles. Given the hype around AI adoption from phones to computers, this week’s news from AMD, Samsung, and now South Korea’s chip base could be symptoms of a cooling bubble. Certainly not the headlines chip bulls want to see.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 22:40

  • Restoring America's Common Enterprise
    Restoring America’s Common Enterprise

    Authored by Peter Berkowitz via RealClearPolitics,

    The United States is days away from a portentous presidential election that, however it turns out, promises to leave around half the nation believing that catastrophe has been narrowly averted and the rest believing that all is lost. Desperate hopes and apocalyptic fears suffuse the electorate. Significant swathes of the right and left – especially among the intellectual class – believe that the other side is dishonest, wicked, and bent on overthrowing democracy in America. This tendency to loathe those in the rival political camp presents an overriding threat to the nation.

    To endure, a rights-protecting or liberal democracy needs citizens who regard themselves as engaged in a common enterprise. They must share a language. They must respect basic moral and political principles. They must take pride in their nation’s accomplishments while facing up to and correcting their country’s flaws by upholding the best in the nation’s traditions and heeding justice’s enduring imperatives. They must trust that as they generally follow society’s written and unwritten rules, so too will others. And they must partake of a broad commitment – that receives expression in the exercise of toleration and civility – to securing a freedom for each consistent with a like freedom for all. Otherwise, democracy will dissolve into authoritarianism as citizens lose the ability to cooperate in nurturing their communities, maintaining a prosperous economy, and protecting their equal rights.

    Seeing themselves as engaged in a common enterprise can be a challenge for citizens of a rights-protecting democracy. That’s because rights and democracy encourage individuals – and the groups to which they belong – to go their own ways. Endowed with differing abilities and dispositions, free citizens develop distinctive interests, hold a diversity of opinions, and pursue happiness in their own manner.

    To preserve unity within this diversity, rights-protecting democracies must educate citizens about their common enterprise. That common enterprise consists in large measure, citizens must learn, in maintaining a political order that enables individuals and families – and the associations they form – to disagree peacefully and even productively not only about ordinary public policy but also about ultimate questions concerning moral excellence and the path to salvation.

    A rising challenge to America’s common enterprise stems from adamant calls to discard the Constitution. The formal crystallization of the country’s dedication to equal liberty under law, the Constitution – its premises, operations, and goals – is permanently open to discussion. But instead of arguing about the interpretation of this or that constitutional provision and rather than debating schools of constitutional jurisprudence, prominent progressive voices increasingly condemn the Constitution as a whole. To take one conspicuous example, Harvard Law School Professor Ryan D. Doerfler and Yale Law School Professor Samuel Moyn argued in the New York Times in “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed” that to save democracy we must “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”

    Leading members of the so-called “new right” – a loose association of national conservatives and common-good conservatives – join, in effect if not intent, progressives in repudiating the Constitution. Self-styled “postliberal” conservatives identify classical liberalism as the root cause of America’s moral, political, cultural, economic, and national-security woes. But the Constitution – which seeks to secure the unalienable rights affirmed by the Declaration of Independence through limited government grounded in the consent of the governed – is steeped in classical liberalism. Consequently, the new right’s attacks on classical liberalism make common cause with progressives who wish to rid the country of the Constitution.

    Against the enthusiasms for overcoming the Constitution, eminent conservatives maintain that recovery of the Constitution’s underlying political theory and its judicious design of primary political institutions can avert the crisis of democracy in America. These conservatives tend to be steeped in history and political philosophy, ancient and modern. They are disposed to support former president Donald Trump without disregarding his shortcomings. And they are well represented in “Democracy in America: a symposium,” which appears in the New Criterion’s October issue.

    Embracing its responsibility as a journal of arts, letters, and the larger public interest – and as a leading publication of thoughtful conservatism – The New Criterion addresses head-on the central issues. In his introduction to the symposium, magazine editor Roger Kimball argues that democracy in America confronts a “siege” that has been gathering momentum for more than 15 years. “Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, followed by the incomprehensible victory of Donald Trump,” writes Kimball, “has radicalized and emboldened the Left.”

    In its emboldened radicalism, Kimball argues, the left has combined in a single indictment the contention that Trump aims to institute despotism and the accusation that the Constitution undermines democracy and subverts the common good. The proof that our Constitution is anti-democratic and dysfunctional, progressive intellectuals contend, is that it allowed Trump to win election as president once and may do so again.

    In contrast, the contributors to The New Criterion symposium maintain that a principal source of the nation’s ills is the disparagement of, and departures from, the Constitution. The contributors highlight the spirit of liberty under law that animates the Constitution and the structure of government by which it maintains freedom. Inspired by Tocqueville’s 19th-century masterpiece, “Democracy in America,” they also stress such non-governmental supports of freedom as family, faith, civic association, liberal education, and the moral and intellectual virtues.

    In “Our Athenian American democracy” my Hoover Institution colleague Victor Davis Hanson argues that contrary to the Constitution’s design – and notwithstanding progressive complaints about democracy’s demise – the United States has embraced, to the detriment of freedom, a purer form of democracy. In its classical form – direct rule of the people – democracy lacked checks on majority will. Indeed, “there was never an Athenian effort to guarantee the rights of the individual against the state,” writes Hanson. “That idea only arrived in the Middle Ages, when it was embodied in Magna Carta, and it later figured prominently in the European Enlightenment and the foundation of the American Republic.” While members of America’s founding generation quarreled vociferously about proper constitutional limits, they were all but unanimous in believing that formal constraints on legislation, executive action, and judicial authority were crucial to the protection of individual rights. Hence, argues Hanson, “the greatest threat to the republican system of the United States may well be the efforts of Washington bureaucrats and agencies to destroy some 236 years of constitutional checks and balances and the political customs that have evolved along with them.”

    In “Tocqueville vs. progressive democracy” Daniel Mahoney, professor emeritus at Assumption University, agrees with Hanson that progressive conceptions of democracy subvert the basic rights and fundamental freedoms on which the American experiment in ordered liberty rests. That’s in part, argues Mahoney, because progressive conceptions of democracy incorporate highly partisan positions that erode the habits of heart and mind necessary for self-government. These include antipathy to tradition, particularly traditional views about religion and sex; preference for cosmopolitanism mixed with distaste for patriotic nationalism; and celebration of self-creation combined with disparagement of self-restraint, honor, and duty.

    Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Piereson contends in “The Washington octopus” that the current strife between the people and the elites in American reflects the old “conflict between ‘country’ and ‘court’ parties” that marked 18th-century politics in Britain and America. Like the court party, contemporary progressives endeavor to direct citizens’ lives from the capital city. Like the country party, many on the right today want to preserve, consistent with basic rights and fundamental freedoms, local control over local affairs. Reformers, argues Piereson, must reverse the concentration of power in Washington built up over decades owing to FDR’s New Deal, post-World War II national-security demands, and LBJ’s Great Society. For starters, he proposes transferring elements of the federal bureaucracy out of Washington – relocating, say, the Department of the Interior to “Montana, Idaho, Utah, or the Dakotas” and the FBI or the Department of Education to “Kansas City, Wichita, Dallas, or any number of other cities.”

    In “Tocqueville’s limitations” Claremont Institute Fellow Glenn Elmers offers a friendly corrective to the great Frenchman, who understood equality as primarily a “sociological force” fueled by a passion to level human affairs. In contrast, America’s founders viewed equality in terms of formal rights that must be institutionalized. A return to equal rights under law, argues Elmers, would limit contemporary managerial elites’ schemes to shift power from the people to federal bureaucrats in Washington. This would hinder the capital city’s imposition on the nation of versions of equity and social justice that seem to many ordinary people neither equitable nor just.

    Confronting what he regards as the progressive juggernaut, Kimball concludes “that conservatism has three main choices.” The first, “outright surrender,” is dishonorable. So is the second – “the dhimmitude of the well-pressed but housebroken Right that exchanges its pampered place on the plantation for political irrelevance.” Accordingly, Kimball opts for the third – “the perhaps paradoxical option of what we might call Alinskyite conservatism, after the canny left-wing activist Saul Alinsky.” It “eschews the quietism of surrender for the activism of what Donald Trump calls ‘winning.’”

    The activist option aimed at winning is preferable provided two conditions are met. Activism must revolve around the energetic defense of constitutional essentials. And winning must signify the restoration of a common enterprise to secure the liberty under law that is the enduring promise of rights-protecting democracy in America.

    Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. State Department. His writings are posted at PeterBerkowitz.com and he can be followed on X @BerkowitzPeter.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 22:15

  • Police Crack Down On Street Takeovers With High-Tech Surveillance As 4th Amendment Battles Loom
    Police Crack Down On Street Takeovers With High-Tech Surveillance As 4th Amendment Battles Loom

    Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    LOS ANGELES—As police across California crack down on illegal street racing, takeovers, and sideshows, technology companies are marketing new surveillance tools to meet the demand—prompting questions about the implications for privacy rights and Fourth Amendment protections.

    An automated license plate reader mounted on a pole in San Francisco, on June 13, 2024. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    In the Bay Area and Los Angeles, where incidents have become increasingly brazen and violent in recent years, often drawing hundreds of attendees and overwhelming police, agencies already rely on planes, drones, and automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras as they aim to reduce the risk to first responders.

    And they’ve begun to see results.

    On Oct. 25 in the Bay Area, the California Highway Patrol (CHP) reported the seizure of 16 vehicles that had been involved in two separate takeovers a month prior. Officers couldn’t reach the center of the sideshow before it moved to another location, but they collected video evidence from cameras placed around the Bay Bridge. That led investigators to a list of vehicles, allowing them to request seizures orders from a judge.

    Armed with these technologies, CHP officers sent to Oakland to crack down on illegal sideshows and rising violent and retail crime have seized more than 2,000 stolen vehicles since February.

    And a controversial surveillance system used by police to detect gunshots and fireworks is now being remarketed as a tool to listen for the sounds of illegal street racing, takeovers and sideshows—like screeching tires—according to an Oct. 23 announcement from Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that leases surveillance systems to thousands of law enforcement agencies across the United States.

    Audio detection offers an additional angle that can be integrated with existing camera networks and analytics, which Flock said in its announcement will provide a “deeper layer of insight, enabling [police] to track repeat offenders and analyze patterns linked to sideshows.”

    When the cameras mounted at intersections are used in conjunction with audio detectors, the analytics system generates a report that lists vehicles, ranked by frequency, near confirmed shootings, fireworks, sideshows or takeovers, according to the company.

    The selling point is that the AI-powered system identifies patterns nearly instantly that would typically take hours or days for humans.

    The newly reconfigured technology raises old questions about the balance between privacy and public safety, which civil rights groups have already been litigating—in the courts and in the public sphere—for years.

    For critics, the deployment of such technologies is part of a long march, a stealth encroachment on constitutional rights that has accelerated in the years since 9/11.

    “Some of these are mass surveillance technologies that shouldn’t be permitted to operate in a democratic society,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union, told The Epoch Times. “We don’t watch everybody all the time, just in case somebody does something wrong somewhere.”

    An automated license plate reader is seen mounted on a pole in San Francisco on June 13, 2024. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

    Technologies like Flock’s cameras and audio detection devices, mounted at public intersections throughout the country in an increasingly dense network, raise questions about the “boundary between what can be done in today’s technology and what should be done,” Stanley said.

    According to a February 2020 report by the state auditor, nearly all of California’s law enforcement agencies already use surveillance cameras that automatically read and report license plate data along with other details of the vehicle, time, and location.

    These typically use infrared cameras to read license numbers and feed them into databases, but some cameras, like Flock’s, can capture more than license plates—things like car color and make, as well as small identifying details.

    According to Flock’s website, police departments in New York, California, Illinois, Texas, and Louisiana are among those already using the company’s Raven system for gunshot detection, which the company claims is 90 percent accurate in identifying gunshots.

    Accuracy Claims

    Various reports have called such claims into question—including a May annual review by the City of San Jose, which initially found around half of alerts were confirmed to be gunshots, with around a third being false positives. After some adjustments to the system, the confirmed number went up to nearly 80 percent.

    Critics argue the tendency of acoustic gunshot detection toward false positives can put people at risk, for example by sending police to a location expecting gunfire where there are innocent people. Such technologies can also record human voices, which law enforcement agencies have used in court.

    “As is so often the case with police surveillance technologies, a device initially deployed for one purpose (here, to detect gunshots) has been expanded to another purpose (to spy on conversations with sensitive microphones),” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on the intersection of civil rights and digital technology.

    Some cities have canceled contracts with Flock or similar providers after analysis revealed disappointing results.

    A 2021 investigation of Flock competitor ShotSpotter found the acoustic gunshot detection system generated more than 40,000 dead-end deployments in Chicago in less than two years, with the vast majority of alerts turning up no evidence of gunfire or related crime.

    The Champaign Police Department in Illinois last year opted not to renew its contract with Flock after results fell short of marketing claims. Data obtained by local journalists showed 59 out of 64 alerts were “unfounded,” with 21 of those likely caused by fireworks.

    “To date, the system has not yet lived up to performance expectations, including misidentifying some sounds—such as fireworks or a vehicle backfire—as possible gunfire,” a police official told CU Citizen Access.

    Flock did not offer an estimate of accuracy in its announcement of the Raven systems repurposed to listen for vehicular chaos, nor did it respond to an inquiry about how many communities use Raven to detect the sounds of street takeovers. But other media have reported at least two Bay Area law enforcement agencies are already using it.

    Vehicles drive over tire skid marks from other drivers doing burnouts and donuts as area residents protest an increase in street racing takeovers in the Angelino Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles on Aug. 26, 2022. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

    A Growing Network

    Cameras that read license plates and microphones that listen for gunshots have been around for decades, but in recent years, California municipalities have expanded their surveillance networks—and rapidly developing AI-powered technology is adding an unprecedented accelerant.

    On Oct. 22, the San Diego Sheriff’s Department announced plans to install 60 additional cameras in unincorporated areas, adding to five cities that have already used them with “significant investigative success,” including solving homicides, kidnappings, vehicle theft, burglaries, and assaults.

    Nodding to privacy and data security concerns, the Department said it has implemented “strict protocols,” including adherence to Senate Bill 34, state legislation from 2015 that regulates how data is used, stored, and shared, and requires regular audits to ensure compliance. San Diego keeps ALPR data for a maximum of one year unless it is being used in ongoing investigations.

    Earlier this year, San Francisco installed 400 ALPR cameras, and Oakland, in partnership with the California Highway Patrol, installed 480 Flock cameras that read license plates and other identifying details.

    “When we’re talking about car break-ins and car theft … when we’re talking about sideshows and some of the other issues that have happened in our city, automatic license plate readers can play an invaluable role in helping us to track some of the perpetrators of these crimes and hold them accountable,” San Francisco Mayor London Breed said at the time.

    In some California cities, police can now also access private security camera networks if neighbors grant them permission.

    For example, Sacramento currently has 809 cameras registered in a program that allows people to register their cameras with the police department, which lets investigators know where the camera is and request video evidence in case of an incident. Businesses and residents can also choose to “integrate” their cameras, giving the police department direct, live access to the feed.

    And “real-time crime centers” in major cities across the United States already combine these modalities. Last month, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department opened its first center in Agoura Hills, and LAPD plans to open multiple in the coming months.

    These centers can tap into license plate readers and existing cameras at intersections, as well as footage from private cameras if businesses or residents allow it.

    Citing low staffing levels and rising crime—including 50 car burglaries across the course of a single weekend in one L.A. City Council District—an LAPD report to the Board of Police Commissioners cited “an acute need to explore new measures, like the use of technology, to mitigate these impacts and improve the department’s response to crime.”

    Privacy Regulations

    In an April memo, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said the “crime-fighting cameras” installed at Oakland intersections would protect privacy by limiting data storage to 28 days and not disclosing footage to third parties beyond other law enforcement agencies, while complying with recent bulletins from the California Attorney General’s office outlining state law that governs data collection, storage and use, including SB 34.

    Police can use ALPRs to match license plates with those on a “hot list” of known offenders. But even if they don’t match, the data is still stored in a database, prompting questions about how it is protected and used.

    The ACLU raised this issue in a 2013 report titled “You Are Being Tracked,” noting that the readers “would pose few civil liberties risks if they only checked plates against hot lists and these hot lists were implemented soundly.” But the networked systems store the compiled data, not just license plates of vehicles that generate hits.

    The “enormous databases” of motorists’ location information that are created as a result, and often pooled among regional systems, are often retained permanently and shared with little to no restriction, the report argued.

    The 2020 state auditor report found that while most California law enforcement agencies use the technology, “few have appropriate usage and privacy policies in place.”

    Special cameras, like the one found on this police car, snap pictures of license plates that pass by. Police say the technology has helped them catch criminals, but some are concerned that authorities are using the system for warrantless tracking. Paul J. Richards/AFP/Getty Images

    The report looked at four agencies—the Fresno and Los Angeles police departments, and the Sacramento and Marin County sheriff’s offices. All of them accumulated a large number of images in their ALPR systems, but most of those did not relate to criminal investigations.

    For example, 99.9 percent of the 320 million images Los Angeles stored at the time were for vehicles that were not on a hot list when the photo was taken.

    And according to a Sacramento grand jury investigation, a vast ALPR system deployed by the county’s sheriffs department and city’s police departments couldn’t distinguish between cars used for criminal activities and those operated legally.

    “And we subsequently learned that both the Sheriff’s Office and Sacramento Police Department have been lax in following state law regarding how ALPR data is shared with other law enforcement entities,” the report said.

    In fact, the investigation found that those departments regularly shared license plate data out of state, which is prohibited by SB 34.

    In an emailed statement, the California attorney general’s office told The Epoch Times such technological tools “are helpful in deterring and investigating crime, serving both to prevent wrongdoing and ensure accountability for those who violate the law,” but that they must be used with “the utmost respect for ethical and legal standards.”

    The attorney general’s office said that recently it has been working with local agencies “to ensure that they are using ALPR systems for their intended use.”

    4th Amendment Concerns

    A federal lawsuit filed Oct. 21 against the use of Flock’s surveillance network in Norfolk, Virginia, alleges the city is violating Fourth Amendment rights by tracking “the whole of a person’s public movements,” thus amounting to a search.

    The City of Norfolk gathers information about “everyone who drives past any of its 172 cameras to facilitate investigating crimes,“ and in doing so, ”violates the long-standing societal expectation that people’s movements and associations over an extended period are their business alone,” the complaint states.

    With all of this done without a warrant, the complaint continues, “This is exactly the type of ‘too permeating police surveillance’ the Fourth Amendment was adopted to prevent.”

    Flock released a statement to media countering that Fourth Amendment case law shows license plate readers don’t constitute a warrantless search because they photograph cars in public, where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, and case precedent in numerous states has upheld the use of evidence from ALPRs as constitutional without requiring a warrant.

    Jay Stanley, the ACLU policy analyst, noted courts are still in the relatively early stages of grappling with these technologies.

    “But courts have also made a number of rulings that sweeping surveillance technology is not consistent with the Fourth Amendment. … I think that automatic license plate readers raise a lot of the same concerns that the Supreme Court addressed in some of the big privacy cases in recent years,” he said.

    Among those are United States v. Jones, in which the government tracked someone’s vehicle with a GPS tracker without a warrant for 28 days, subsequently securing a conviction with the resulting data; the court held that such constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. Previously a lower court had ruled the data was admissible because the suspect had no reasonable expectation of privacy when his car was on public streets.

    And in Carpenter v. United States, the court held that acquisition of a suspect’s cell-site records—historical location data from cell phone providers, obtained without a warrant—constituted a Fourth Amendment search.

    “When you have enough license plate readers out there, it becomes tantamount to being tracked with a GPS. And so it raises the same issues that the court has already ruled on,” Stanley said.

    He suggested that communities need time to digest these technologies and their potential consequences before adopting them at such speed and scale.

    “Communities need to decide whether they want to allow the police departments that serve them to have the new powers these technologies convey and whether they’re even effective at reducing crime and ultimately making communities a better place—which is the whole point of law enforcement and government,” he said.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 21:25

  • Watch: DC Begins Boarding Up Ahead Of Election Over Social Unrest Fears 
    Watch: DC Begins Boarding Up Ahead Of Election Over Social Unrest Fears 

    Washington, DC authorities are hardening security for potential social unrest after next week’s presidential election. With four days remaining, workers have been busy boarding up government buildings and retail stores with plywood. 

    “Work crews have begun covering up the windows of buildings and stores near the White House as the election comes down to the final week,” DC resident Andrew Leyden wrote on X. 

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    Leyden posted a video on YouTube of himself riding around on a bike near the White House complex, showing the various buildings being boarded up. 

    In the video’s description, he wrote, “When there is a threat of civil unrest, these landlords cover their windows, much like you do when a hurricane is coming.” 

    “We do expect the Capitol complex to be much more hardened,” DC Mayor Muriel Bowser said last week, who was quoted by Axios. She told residents to be “flexible” as demonstrations and detours emerge. 

    The ultra-hardening of security around and near the White House might be preparation for a possible Trump victory. With far-left corporate media outlets pushing ‘Trump Nazi,’ ‘Trump Hitler,’ and ‘Trump fascist’ rhetoric nonstop ahead of the election, this hate speech propaganda could certainly fuel leftist radicals to become violently unhinged if Trump wins next week.

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    A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey showed that most Americans are somewhat worried about social unrest after or during next Tuesday night’s election results. 

    Ohio Rep. (D) Greg Landsman told Axios that even as September approached, security was “preparing in a way that is very different from what has happened in the past,” adding, “I had never seen anything like it.”

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 21:00

  • Natural Gas And AI Data Centers Provide Unique PA Political Opportunity
    Natural Gas And AI Data Centers Provide Unique PA Political Opportunity

    Authored by Tim Ryan via RealClearEnergy,

    Artificial Intelligence (AI) is more than the latest buzzword. It’s rising rapidly, permeating across industries, and is already present in our daily lives. Netflix uses AI to personalize recommendations to users, 50% of global organizations reported adopting AI in at least one business area in 2022, and more than half of Americans use voice assistants to receive information.

    Behind this tech revolution are electricity-thirsty data centers dotting America’s landscape, processing AI, crypto, e-commerce, and cloud computing. The collective rise in demand to our power grid is something not seen in decades.

    An AI Google search, for example, needs 10 times the amount of energy as a normal Google search, and all of the current data centers worldwide combined consume more power than all but 16 countries.

    AI alone is expected to add 20% more to US electricity demand by 2030 and Goldman Sachs projects natural gas will cover 60% of demand. Our grid is bound to hit a limit in its current state, according to Microsoft leadership. To provide the steady, reliable, and affordable power these facilities need, natural gas-powered electricity is increasingly the obvious choice.

    As the second-largest natural gas production state, Pennsylvania is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity quickly, benefit from new job creation and investment, and power our high-tech future if we collectively embrace natural gas as part of that solution. Doing so would be welcome news for trade unions and high-tech professionals alike, alongside local communities who benefit from new tax revenues.

    It’s clear Vice President Kamala Harris’ thinking has evolved on energy, along with other Democrats across the country.

    Harris had a front row seat as American natural gas rapidly secured our allies abroad against the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And she understands how critical natural gas is in achieving her Administration’s goals of reshoring critical manufacturing jobs, alongside renewables, that benefit America’s heartland in states like Pennsylvania. Notably natural gas, more than renewables, is the primary source of America’s world-leading carbon reductions over the last two decades and will continue to be a low-carbon solution deployed abroad to replace coal and fight climate change.

    It is this debate on natural gas: balancing economic strength, technology, global competitiveness, staying ahead of China, and fighting climate change, where Harris can cement her political position as a sensible Democrat who uniquely understands Pennsylvania.

    The Keystone State is already home to 71 data centers, with hubs in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and has potential to attract even more given its proximity to the Marcellus Shale gas formations that have led Pennsylvania’s energy revolution in recent years. Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro has taken notice of this potential, speaking at an AI forum at Carnegie Mellon this month.

    Data centers that power AI are so energy-intensive and desperate to meet these power demands that a mothballed nuclear plant once set for decommissioning, Three Mile Island Unit 1 near Harrisburg, will be restarted as part of a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft. This is a positive development, but its potential to be replicated is limited. Natural gas is abundant, flexible, and affordable.

    Some will say to build renewables only instead, but that is simplistic thinking.

    We’re already far behind the massive and costly 60% expansion of America’s power grid that Princeton University says is needed just to transition our existing grid to a net-zero future. While solar and wind are vital to a clean energy future, their weather dependence cannot fulfill 24/7 power needs.

    Harris has a track record on aligning natural gas with opportunity. Under her Administration, the U.S. became the global leader of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, and was the largest LNG supplier to Europe in 2022 and 2023, stabilizing the economies of our Allies after Russia’s Ukraine invasion.

    Pennsylvania workers were part of that victory.

    Other statewide Democrats get it. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA) and John Fetterman (D-PA) have stood up to their Party and supported the natural gas industry, and Governor Shapiro has laid out plans for a diverse, resilient electricity grid. Pennsylvanians agree: 74% support building more natural gas infrastructure and 79% said natural gas drilling is important to the state’s economy.

    Pennsylvania has the natural resources, the infrastructure, and the know-how to power the AI boom and benefit so many across the Commonwealth. Natural gas remains the obvious choice to scale up fast to meet new demands, protect our environment, and support Pennsylvania jobs. Balance is key. AI is the future, and the United States can only lead on it with practical energy policy that starts in key states like Pennsylvania.

    Presidential candidate Harris would be smart to embrace it.

    Tim Ryan served ten terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2003 to 2023. He serves as the co-chair of the Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future Leadership Council.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 20:35

  • Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Possible Within 'Days': Lebanese PM
    Israel-Hezbollah Ceasefire Possible Within ‘Days’: Lebanese PM

    Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati has issued a surprisingly optimistic assessment of the possibility of peace in Lebanon. On Wednesday he said that a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah might be achieved in the coming days.

    He cited a ‘hopeful’ conversation with US special envoy Amos Hochstein, related to a new Washington-backed ceasefire proposal. “We are doing our best… to have a ceasefire within the coming hours or days,” PM Mikati told Lebanese broadcaster Al-Jadeed. He said he remains “cautiously optimistic.”

    Mikati explained he has reason to believe that a full ceasefire is possible and even realistic prior to the US election on November 5. On the other side, an Israeli official has told ABC News of “significant progress” toward a ceasefire in Lebanon.

    Caretaker PM Najib Mikati, via Al Monitor

    Two senior White House advisers have meanwhile arrived in Israel Thursday as part of an effort to finalize and close the deal. Amos Hochstein and Brett McGurk are said to be going into it with the belief that Hezbollah has so many blows, especially the death of its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah, that it is looking to disassociate itself from Hamas and the Gaza war.

    According to Axios: “A deal that would end the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah could be achieved within a few weeks, Israeli and U.S. officials said.” The same report has listed out the following simultaneous diplomatic engagements of the US in the region:

    • Israeli officials said Biden adviser Amos Hochstein was waiting for Israeli leaders to decide about whether to move forward with the deal before he traveled to Israel.
    • The fact that he and Biden adviser Brett McGurk are coming suggest Netanyahu is in favor of pursuing the deal, they said.
    • CIA director Bill Burns will be in Cairo on Thursday “to engage with Egyptian counterparts on bilateral matters as well as the process to secure the release of hostages,” the official said.
    • “CENTCOM Commander Gen. Erik Kurilla is traveling to the region to discuss regional defense and will visit Israel to engage with counterparts and U.S. personnel.”

    Israeli media has said that contents of the US-proposed deal have leaked online, citing Kan public broadcaster.

    “The ceasefire proposal begins with a 60-day implementation period, during which time the Lebanese army will deploy along the border and confiscate Hezbollah arms in southern Lebanon,” Times of Israel says of the documents.

    “The IDF will be required to pull all troops from Lebanon within seven days of the end of hostilities, and will be replaced by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF),” it adds. UN peacekeeping troops will reportedly facilitate the transition, and some 10,000 Lebanese national army troops. According to more:

    At the end of the 60-day implementation period, Israel and Lebanon will hold indirect negotiations via the US on fully implementing Resolution 1701 and resolving border disputes.

    A new International Monitoring and Enforcement Mechanism (IMEM) will be created, with the US serving as chair and with the participation of Italy, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, UNIFIL and regional countries.

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    But in the meantime Israel’s airstrikes on positions in the south, Beirut, and even in the northeast have continued. They’ve even expanded, with the Bekaa Valley getting pounded, and Tyre getting hit again on Thursday.

    But the same day Israeli is reporting that at least six civilians have been killed by Hezbollah rocket attacks on the north, including some foreign workers in the city of Metula. An Israeli woman has also been killed in Haifa Bay.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 20:10

  • Secret Service Brass Interfered In IG Assassination Probe
    Secret Service Brass Interfered In IG Assassination Probe

    Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

    Secret Service leaders meddled in an independent government investigation of the July 13 assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump and are still not following many basic agency security protocols for presidential candidates, presidents, and vice presidents in the final days before the election, according to emails reviewed by RealClearPolitics and several sources in the Secret Service community.

    As Secret Service failures came to light in the weeks after the July assassination attempt, USSS managers sent emails to employees asking them to alert them to any “direct requests for information or interview” from the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, or DHS OIG. The internal government watchdog is conducting its probe of the failures that led to the near assassination of Trump, the killing of fireman Corey Comperatore, and the wounding of two other rally-goers at the western Pennsylvania campaign event.

    The emails, which RealClearPolitics reviewed, contained the subject line “DHS OIG Inquiries” and directed employees to tell their supervisors if an OIG official reaches out to them so Secret Service managers could coordinate “an organized response.” Supervisors sent the email five days after the same inspector general issued a negative report on the Secret Service’s actions before and on Jan. 6, criticizing the agency for failing to detect a pipe bomb near Vice President Kamala Harris and not flagging signs of potential violence to other agencies.

    Normally, responding to DHS OIG investigators without talking to superiors would not warrant coordination with supervisors, the email stated. But after the first assassination attempt against Trump, USSS leadership needed to provide the proper context and a coordinated response.

    “Generally, not an issue; however, this is NOT the normal course of action, and the Service needs awareness and to ensure an organized response with information in the correct context,” Secret Service supervisors wrote in the emails, noting that “only we know what we do.”

    The email is now under Senate scrutiny. Sen. Chuck Grassley, a longtime champion of government whistleblowers, on Wednesday sent a letter to Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe expressing concern that the email and any other communications like it could have “a chilling effect” on employee disclosures to the inspector general’s office, as well as on congressional investigations.

    “If this email is an accurate representation of the actions taken by Secret Service management, it could have a chilling effect on its employees from fully cooperating and providing information to the DHS OIG as well as congressional investigations out of fear of retaliation since supervisors will apparently be keeping tabs on their communications,” Grassley wrote in the letter, a copy of which his office provided to RCP.

    Instead of trying to control the flow and context of information, Secret Service leaders should be “encouraging” employees to “come forward to provide truthful information to the DHS OIG and Congress so that lessons can be learned to prevent future assassination attempts,” Grassley added.

    The Iowa Republican set a deadline of Nov. 13 for Rowe to hand over all records “between and among Secret Service personnel” related to providing information to the DHS OIG and congressional investigations into the July 13 attempted assassination.

    Tristan Leavitt, an attorney and president of Empower Oversight, which represents Secret Service, IRS, and other government whistleblowers, said the email demanding that potential whistleblowers coordinate communications with their bosses stifles the free flow of information, which could help improve the agency’s performance and which federal law protects.

    “Secret Service employees have every right to anonymously contact the DHS OIG without informing their supervisor,” Leavitt said. “While this email is purportedly aimed at employees contacted directly by the OIG, it will undoubtedly discourage employees who may have information about wrongdoing from contacting the OIG or Congress.”

    The Secret Service acknowledged receipt of Grassley’s letter but declined to respond to RCP’s questions about how many supervisors sent the email and whether there were other attempts to pressure employees from independently discussing problems they’ve experienced in the Secret Service with DHS OIG or congressional investigators.

    “The U.S. Secret Service is in receipt of the letter sent by Senator Grassley,” an agency spokesman said in a statement. “The Secret Service has been and will continue to examine the events of the July 13 assassination attempt and will fully cooperate with Congress and other relevant investigations. We respect the Senator’s role of oversight within the Senate Judiciary Committee and will respond through official channels.”

    In the hectic waning hours before Election Day, Secret Service agents are also complaining about security shortcuts that agency leaders are allowing, sometimes requiring, to handle last-minute venue changes and adjustments to Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s break-neck campaign schedule.

    The Secret Service still has not provided Trump’s campaign with a military aircraft three weeks after it was requested, even though President Biden said earlier this month that he had authorized the Department of Homeland Security to “give him every single thing he needs.”

    Sources in the Secret Service community tell RCP that Trump’s campaign staff have made significant changes to his schedule less than 12 hours before arrivals, hamstringing the advance team’s ability to plan, coordinate, and obtain manpower and resources properly. The last-minute changes, which are typical in the final weeks of a presidential campaign, have posed significant challenges to providing security for Trump, who is still facing known threats from foreign and domestic actors.

    After a second attempt on Trump’s life, the Secret Service started using ballistic glass to provide extra security for the Republican presidential nominee at outdoor and other venues. But at times, late schedule changes have prevented the glass from being in place when it should have been and has led to a shortage of security manpower, these sources assert.

    Secret Service agents also complain that the agency’s managers devoted to Harris’ security have instructed advance personnel to submit manpower and resource requests without knowing any of the sites in Harris’ schedule. They also complain that Harris’ staff are “disorganized” in determining sites and are dictating what resources the vice president should have against the Secret Service advance team’s strong recommendations without any pushback from agency leaders.

    “This is not new, just a continuation of poor USSS leadership,” a source tells RCP. “It puts the entire Secret Service into a cross-your-fingers-and-hope-nothing-happens situation. Sound familiar?”

    The Secret Service also has come up short in securing Harris’ communications with her advance team, so they don’t share vital movements and logistics with the public or unwanted parties, according to several sources. The White House Communications Agency provides secure communications services for only the president and vice president but does not extend those to Trump because of a lack of resources.

    However, even Harris’ campaign staff and her Secret Service advance teams have been using unauthorized communications because of a dearth of WHCA manpower and resources coupled with last-minute changes to the vice president’s campaign schedule, the sources contend.

    Secret Service sources argue that the security procedures have not only failed to improve since July 13 but have further deteriorated.

    The USSS workforce is “aggressively communicating” to their supervisors that they are providing inadequate security that fails to meet agency standards, while the agency’s leaders, ensconced in their Washington offices, are assuring everyone that “they’ll be fine and to keep up the good work,” one source argues.

    “It’s those on the front lines, who do the long hours and impossible tasks, who get thrown under the bus when everything does go wrong while leaders simply retire and move on,” the source told RCP. “No accountability.”

    The agency did not respond to questions about these alleged deviations from agency security protocols.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 19:45

  • China Weaponizes Supply Chain, Sends America's Largest Drone Maker Into Crisis
    China Weaponizes Supply Chain, Sends America’s Largest Drone Maker Into Crisis

    America’s largest drone company and supplier of unmanned aircraft to the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been thrown into a supply chain crisis after Beijing imposed sanctions, barring it from sourcing drone parts from Chinese suppliers, according to a new Financial Times report. This is another wake-up call for American companies heavily reliant on China, highlighting the urgent need to ‘friend-shore’ or ‘reshore’ critical supply chains away from the world’s second-largest economy.

    Sources familiar with the situation told FT that Beijing imposed sanctions on Skydio to prevent it from sourcing battery components from Chinese firms. 

    On Wednseday, Skydio said the sanctions by China were “for selling drones to Taiwan, where our only customer today is the National Fire Agency.”

    Skydio CEO Adam Bry met with US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and senior White House officials last week to discuss the dire situation as the Chinese paralyzed part of the drone company’s supply chain.

    “This is a clarifying moment for the drone industry,” Bry told customers in a letter obtained by FT. He said, “If there was ever any doubt, this action makes clear that the Chinese government will use supply chains as a weapon to advance their interests over ours.”

    Bry continued, “This is an attempt to eliminate the leading American drone company and deepen the world’s dependence on Chinese drone suppliers.” 

    China initially unveiled the sanctions on October 11 as retaliation for Washington’s move to sell attack drones to Taiwan. The FT noted that the company recently secured a contract with Taiwan’s fire agency. 

    FT sources did not mention which of Skydio’s Chinese suppliers were affected by the sanctions.

    Using public trade data compiled by counterparty and supply chain risk intelligence firm Sayari, about 94.44% of Skydio’s drone component shipments came from Vietnam, 4.9% from Hong Kong, and .65% from China. 

    Source: Sayari 

    A list of Skydio’s suppliers – mainly in Asia. 

    Source: Sayari 

    Here is the latest drone part shipment data for Skydio. 

    Source: Sayari 

    One official told FT, “We suspect Skydio was targeted by Beijing because it is likely seen as a competitor to DJI,” adding, “If there is a silver lining, we can use this episode to accelerate our work to diversify drone supply chains away from . . . China.”

    It seems like a tit-for-tat-sanction war between America and the Chinese to weaken each other drone-manufacturing capabilities.

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    These Chinese sanctions undermine US defense and drone manufacturers … it’s time for ‘America First’ policies to avoid this kind of shitshow. 

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 19:20

  • "It Did Occur" – Kentucky County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth 'Glitch' Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala
    “It Did Occur” – Kentucky County Clerk Confirms Voting Booth ‘Glitch’ Shifted Trump Votes To Kamala

    Earlier in the day, a video went viral of voters in Kentucky having ‘issues’ with an electronic voting machine that selected “Kamala Harris” when the voter had pressed on “Donald Trump”…

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    Admittedly, we have seen a few of these style of clips over the past few weeks and viewed it with the same level of skepticism we usually do.

    However, this time is different because the local County Clerk just issued a statement on Facebook confirming the issue “did occur”… but not before he had denied it occurred.

    According to the Laurel County Clerk Tony Brown, the machine was taken out of service while waiting for a rep from the AG’s Office.

    Screenshot here (just in case something interesting happens to the statement)

    So, the initial reaction was:

    There is no vote rigging here. It’s just a vast right wing conspiracy.

    Then, 3 hours later…

    Ok, the voting machine was busted, but it really was just a “ballot marking device” and as long as you triple checked everything, you must have caught the error

    Here’s the full statement:

    The Attorney General’s office has been to the vote center to check the device that has been shown across social media today. In full disclosure, after several minutes of attempting to recreate the scenario, it did occur. This was accomplished by hitting some area in between the boxes. After that we tried for several minutes to do it again and could not.

    Since this is going out across the USA and the world, I want to explain to everyone that this is a ballot marking device. You insert your blank ballot into it to vote your specific ballot for your precinct. It shows you who you have chosen for each race and notifies you if you didn’t make a selection in a race before it allows the voter to continue to the next page. When you come to the end of the ballot it shows you how you voted in every race and issue.

    It confirms with each voter that they are satisfied with their selections twice before printing the ballot. Once you receive your ballot back from the ballot marking device you can review your choices again before placing it into the scanner. If you made a mistake, you may spoil that ballot and receive another one, Kentucky Law allows two spoiled ballots only. Once you are satisfied with your ballot you may place it into the scanner, and it verifies that it has been counted.

    These ballot marking devices are set for a voter to touch Inside the whole box with the name of the candidates. In the video posted you can see us going back and forth through the names with no issues. This is the same machine used by the voter in the video.

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    It remained at its location in the vote center and was set face down until the representative from the Attorney General’s Office arrived to investigate. There were no claims of any issues with the device prior, and none since it went back into service. The voter who posted the video did cast her ballot which she said was correct.

    I hate that this has occurred here in Laurel County.

    We strive to have accurate, secure and safe elections that we are proud to provide to our citizens. I hope all can get to the polls and make your voice heard November 5th. If you read through this entire post, thank you very much for your time.

    …isn’t it ‘funny’ how these ‘glitches’ are never in Trump’s favor?

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 19:00

  • Mail Ballots Without Dates Must Be Counted: Pennsylvania Court
    Mail Ballots Without Dates Must Be Counted: Pennsylvania Court

    Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

    A Pennsylvania court ruled on Oct. 30 that the state’s requirement for mail-in ballots to be correctly dated in order to be counted is unconstitutional, though the 3–2 decision, according to the judge’s opinion, applies only to a past special election.

    Poll workers demonstrate how ballots are received, processed, scanned, and stored on Election Day, at the Philadelphia Election Warehouse in Philadelphia on Oct. 25, 2024. Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images

    A Commonwealth Court panel upheld a ruling by a Philadelphia judge stating that 69 ballots from the special election, submitted on time but lacking handwritten dates, must be counted.

    While Pennsylvania law requires those voting by mail to date the envelope in which the ballot is returned, “multiple state and federal courts have determined that the dating provisions are meaningless, as they do not establish voter eligibility, timely ballot receipt, or fraud,” Commonwealth Court Judge Ellen Ceisler wrote for the majority.

    “We cannot countenance any law governing elections, determined to be mandatory or otherwise, that has the practical effect in its application of impermissibly infringing on certain individuals’ fundamental right to vote,” she said later. “We are not being asked to make changes with respect to the impending 2024 General Election.”

    In a dissenting opinion, Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCullough said the court should not have decided on the matter now because it “surely will confuse the expectations of both voters and county boards of elections alike.”

    “The only reason that either the trial court or the Majority would rule on this question now is precisely to change the rules for the already underway general election,” she said, referring to the Nov. 5 election in which some voters are casting early or absentee ballots.

    The timing of the decision deprives the Pennsylvania Supreme Court of a reasonable opportunity to review before the Nov. 5 election, Commonwealth Court Judge Matthew Wolf said in another dissent.

    “Pennsylvania voters cannot be disenfranchised for trivial reasons,” Stephen Loney, senior supervising attorney of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, which is representing plaintiffs in the case, said in a statement. “The dates written on return envelopes are completely meaningless, and everyone agrees that these ballots are from eligible voters and were timely received. Disqualifying voters for minor errors is a violation of the state constitution, which errs on the side of the voter.”

    The ruling went against the Republican National Committee and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, which, as intervenors, had asked the appeals court to overturn an earlier ruling by Court of Common Pleas Judge James Crumlish III. Crumlish’s ruling required the counting of the 69 ballots after finding that the date requirement violated the Pennsylvania Constitution.

    The Republicans have not yet reacted to the ruling.

    The Philadelphia Board of Elections, the defendant in the case, and which also appealed Crumlish’s ruling, did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

    Pennsylvania’s Department of State said in an Aug. 30 social media post that writing the date on ballot envelopes “provides no purpose to election administration.”

    Earlier this year, the Commonwealth Court also found the date requirement unconstitutional for voters who returned their ballots on time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated this decision, stating that the Commonwealth Court lacked the authority to review the case due to the involvement of county election boards as defendants.

    McCullough said that the new ruling suffered from some of the same problems as the ruling that was vacated.

    Mimi McKenzie, legal director of the Public Interest Law Center, said after the latest ruling that the date requirement may be adjudicated further in the future and encouraged voters to still date the envelope in which a ballot is returned.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 18:55

  • North Korea Test Launches ICBM, Capable of Hitting US, With Record-Setting Flight
    North Korea Test Launches ICBM, Capable of Hitting US, With Record-Setting Flight

    North Korea is increasingly back in the news amid soaring tensions on multiple fronts, especially following accusations that it sent some 10,000 of its troops to Russia to prepare for possible deployment to fight in Ukraine.

    Pyongyang on Thursday test-fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) for the first time in almost a year. What’s more is that the flight is widely being described as a North Korean rocket’s longest ever flight time.

    Given that nuclear warhead-capable ICBMs can reach several thousands of miles away, such a missile would have the capability of hitting the continental United States. And the timing has not been lost on anyone, coming a mere days before the US presidential election.

    Via Reuters/illustrative: North Korea has been test-firing long range missiles such as the Hwasong-18, shown in this photograph from 13 July last year.

    “I affirm that the DPRK will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces,” Kim Jong Un declared.

    The following detailed description and analysis of the launch’s implications was provided by NBC:

    The missile was launched from a site near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, at 7:10 a.m. local time (6:10 p.m. Wednesday ET), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. Spokesperson Lee Sung-joon said the missile was fired “at a very high altitude” and traveled more than 600 miles before it landed in the sea off North Korea’s east coast.

    The launch might have been held so close to the U.S. election to strengthen North Korea’s negotiating leverage and grab attention, Lee said.

    He said the weapon might have been fueled by solid propellants, which allow missiles to be launched faster and move more discreetly than liquid-fueled ones, and that it might have been fired from a 12-axle launch vehicle, which was revealed last month and is North Korea’s biggest mobile launch platform. 

    This might also be response to recent threatening language and warnings issued by US, NATO, and Ukrainian officials related to reports of North Korean troops in Ukraine.

    For example the US warned a UN security council meeting on Wednesday that North Korean troops will “come home in body bags”.

    Washington is also busy reaffirming the South Korea that it calls under America’s nuclear umbrella, according to treaties:

    “I assured Minister Kim today that the United States remains fully committed to the defense of the ROK and our extended deterrence commitment remains ironclad,” Austin said. “That commitment is backed by the full range of America’s conventional missile defense, nuclear and advanced non-nuclear capabilities.”

    He added that the US and South Korea will be returning “to large scale exercises” and “strengthening [their] combined readiness and our interoperability.”

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    And yet it is drills just like these which Kim Jong Un has cited over and over again as being justification enough to expand his nuclear arsenal.

    Pyongyang and Moscow are also in parallel deepening their defense ties, having inked their own pact this summer, and the Kremlin has cited this as the legal basis for North Korean troops being hosted in Russia.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 18:30

  • Watch: RFK Jr. Explains Plan For Reforming The CIA
    Watch: RFK Jr. Explains Plan For Reforming The CIA

    Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

    Former President John F. Kennedy threatened to “splinter [the CIA] into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds” before he was assassinated in 1963. JFK’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., wants something perhaps less dramatic.

    In a Trump campaign event with Tulsi Gabbard on Saturday, RFK explained his idea for reforming the CIA. According to him, reforming the CIA is as simple as splintering the “espionage” and “plans” divisions, which handle matters of intelligence and paramilitary operations, respectively. Those divisions are referred to today as the Directorate of Intelligence and Directorate of Operations.

    RFK said the two divisions need to be reorganized so the intelligence/espionage area has oversight of the paramilitary operations. He said his father had a similar plan when he was Attorney General.

    “My father had a reform plan … Break up espionage division from the plans division, which is paramilitary division that fixes elections, buys newspapers, assassinates foreign leaders and so on,” he said.

    “I would break up those divisions and … put espionage division oversight of plans division.”

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    Such a plan may seem tepid for a man who’s accused the CIA of being involved in the murder of his uncle. But RFK’s been surprisingly cordial with the agency. His daughter-in-law and campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, was a CIA officer for 10 years.

    RFK also revealed at Saturday’s campaign event in North Carolina that he had dinner with former Trump-era CIA Director Mike Pompeo. RFK called Pompeo a “neocon” and said he disagreed with him on many policies, but also said he admired him, calling the former agency director brilliant.

    RFK said Pompeo told him that “The worst mistake of my public lie was not fixing CIA. I could have but I didn’t do it.”

    “The entire upper echelon of that agency is made of individuals who don’t believe in the institutions of the United States of America,” RFK said.

    Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 18:05

  • Iran Readies Major Retaliatory Strike From Iraq 'In Coming Days': Israeli Officials
    Iran Readies Major Retaliatory Strike From Iraq ‘In Coming Days’: Israeli Officials

    Axios is reporting Thursday that Iran is still preparing a major retaliation in response to the Israeli aerial attack of the overnight and early morning hours of last Saturday. Israel’s strikes on missile and military facilities was itself a much anticipated response to the Oct.1st ballistic missile attack.

    While most regional observers believe the tit-for-tat has cooled down, reflected in declining oil prices this week, the Axios report cites a pair of Israeli officials to say “Israeli intelligence suggests Iran is preparing to attack Israel from Iraqi territory in the coming days, possibly before the US presidential election.”

    Wiki Commons

    This would involve large numbers of drones and ballistic missiles, they say. Throughout the Gaza war, there have been sporadic drones launched by Iran-backed paramilitary units in Iraq, but nothing on a major scale.

    Israeli sources on Thursday have suggested Iran is actually moving ballistic missiles to prepare for such an attack.

    Also, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander Hossein Salami has been cited as saying that Iran’s response will be “different from any scenario” Israel might expect.

    CNN too has been reporting the fresh threats, on Wednesday writing the following based on Iranian military sources:

    Israel’s recent attacks on Iran will be met with a “definitive and painful” response that will likely come before the US presidential vote, a high-ranking source told CNN on Wednesday.

    The remarks signal a departure from Iran’s initial attempts to downplay the severity of the strikes carried out by Israel on October 25, which marked the first time Israel has openly acknowledged striking Iranian targets.

    “The response of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the aggression of the Zionist regime will be definitive and painful,” the source, who is familiar with Iran’s deliberations, said.

    Although the source did not provide an exact date for the attack, they said it “will probably take place before the day of the US presidential election.”

    Meanwhile, the Iraqi government is seething over Israeli warplanes violating its airspace during last weekend’s attack. It has lodged an official protest note with the United Nations about the illegal breach.

    It appears the some one hundred Israeli jets reportedly used in the attack fired on Iran from over neighboring Iraqi airspace. Such a tactic has long been utilized by the Israeli Air Force in attacking Syria, as it typically fires from over undefended Lebanese airspace.

    Currently US and Israeli negotiators say they are getting close to achieving a ceasefire with Hezbollah, but any new large-scale attack from the ‘Iranian axis’ would surely jeopardize such a potential deal.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 17:45

  • Make Election Day A Federal Holiday, Require In-Person Voting
    Make Election Day A Federal Holiday, Require In-Person Voting

    Authored by Ethan Watson via RealClearPolitics,

    Our calendars are full of useless holidays. Just last week, we saw Credit Union Day, Mashed Potato Day, and Raw Milk Cheese Appreciation Day. While observances like these are otherwise irrelevant at the national level, there is one day of the year that has long lacked federal “holiday” status: Election Day.

    Unlike offhanded observances such as Earth Day, on which life goes on as usual, Election Day ought to be an official federal holiday like Presidents’ Day or Thanksgiving, with all non-essential workers receiving a paid day off to carry out their civic duty. Establishing this yearly event as a federal holiday would increase voter turnout, restore faith in our elections, and, most importantly, boost morale through a shared civic display.

    Designating Election Day as a national holiday and giving workers the day off would largely mitigate the need for accommodations like mail-in voting and early voting, allowing policymakers to require in-person voting except in special circumstances. This would also make possible a mass return to paper ballots, eliminating the need for voting machines which have been swamped in scandal since 2020.

    Some say mail-in voting is ripe for manipulation; others contend voting machines are prone to hacks and glitches. While it’s difficult to quantify how much voting machines or absentee ballots have increased the risk of election-rigging, if at all, it’s clear that a significant number of Americans have lost faith in our elections – just as they’ve lost faith in our media, our government, and their friends and neighbors.

    In a world where most Americans have the day off work and vote in person, on a paper ballot, many common doubts about our election system become moot. Of course, exceptions will apply for essential workers or citizens temporarily living in a different state, but the vast majority of Americans would have to physically go to a polling place on Election Day and vote. Volunteers would then count the paper ballots onsite, significantly reducing doubts about voting machine integrity or ballots lost in the mail.

    Prominent right-wingers like Vivek Ramaswamy have actually promoted this plan over the course of the 2024 election, citing election integrity concerns. Yet, making Election Day a federal holiday would go far beyond healing the election-denial wound – it would generate patriotism with a new shared tradition.

    Civic virtue is a good thing, and public reminders of it are even better. To appreciate our democracy and commit ourselves to maintaining it, we need a public reminder that tyranny, not democracy, has been the norm throughout human history. The United States is exceptional because we establish power not through strength, but by consensus.

    As humans, we need physical reminders to keep us mindful of such abstract truths. That’s why we build churches, write great works of literature, and even get tattoos. If the principles we hold dear aren’t manifested in anything, we lose them.

    A mass migration of Americans to the polls every year would become a powerful symbol of our democracy’s resilience, a shining example to the world that our grand experiment worked. Moreover, a whole day for voting could inspire people to participate in state and local elections – affairs that have an even greater impact on their daily lives than national elections.

    People would look forward to voting. It would become a celebrated ritual in a public life otherwise devoid of shared traditions. One could imagine pre-voting brunches and post-voting barbecues. Families could go to the polls in the morning and spend the rest of the day enjoying their freedom and leisure together. Children would grow up looking forward to participating in their citizenship, just like we look forward to Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the first day of summer vacation.

    These days, Americans can’t even agree on whether the Fourth of July is a day worth celebrating (spoiler alert, it is). But without a shared culture, we cannot have a nation. It’s time to start rebuilding that shared culture with a national day that puts our exceptional founding ideals to work.

    Ethan Watson is a Young Voices contributor working towards a Master of Accounting degree at the University of Kansas. He holds dual undergraduate degrees in Accounting and Political Science with an eye toward law school in the near future. Follow him on X: @erwatson13.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 17:25

  • Apple Slides After Guiding Below Consensus, Missing On Wearables, China And Service Revenues
    Apple Slides After Guiding Below Consensus, Missing On Wearables, China And Service Revenues

    Update (530pm ET): AAPL is sliding to session lows after hours after revealing some very lukewarm guidance on the call, saying it now expects Q1 revenue to grow in the low to mid-single digits YoY (assume 4-6%). The sellside consensus is at 7%.

    As Bloomberg notes, “low to mid single digits” growth means a slowdown for Apple, which just reported a 6% sales rise. So it’s understandable why shares moved south after that pronouncement. They’re now down about 2% in extended trading.

    So much for the AI revolution sparking  a new iPhone supercycle (which would lead to double digit revenue growth).

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    Ahead of earnings, UBS had Apple sentiment at a relatively subdued 6/10. That’s because despite AI enthusiasm following Apple’s WWDC event over the summer, UBS analyst David Vogt’s checks and other ancedotal evidence indicated iPhone unit sell-through in the Sept quarter was effectively flattish year over year at around 46 mn versus global sell-through up 2% y/y. Vogt previewed, anticipating September Quarter results largely in line with his forecast of $94 bn/$158 bn with a chance for upside driven by iPad and flattish iPhone units of 46 mn versus sell-through up 2% y/y. Factoring in 5 mn iPhone channel fill, David forecasts 51 mn iPhone units and iPhone revenue of $45.7 bn and expectations of 4-5 mn beat (following a report from IDC suggesting 56 mn units in Q3) with balanced December Quarter commentary. David anticipates only a modest tailwind from AI in the Dec Quarter and forecasts 78 mn iPhone units and remains at neutral and a $236 price target.

    Furthermore, despite multiple observations that AI is not boosting iPhone sales (see “Apple Intelligence is here. Early users are underwhelmed”), investors continue to give Apple the benefit of the doubt of a successful iPhone 16 launch, which thus far is not overly supportive based on checks/sell-through. Many appear to be holding out for further confirmation until the rollout of Apple Intelligence but David anticipates balanced commentary regarding December Quarter iPhone demand. Valuation is a common pushback, but absent a significant iPhone miss UBS is not sure the Q3 results will be much of a catalyst either way for the stock. In terms of flows, more long only demand/buyers for the most part.

    So with all that in mind, here is what AAPL just reported for the quarter ended Sept 30:

    • Adjusted EPS 1.64 c vs. $1.46 y/y, beating estimates of 1.58
    • Revenue $94.93 billion, +6.1% y/y, beating estimates of $94.36 billion
      • Products revenue $69.96 billion, +4.1% y/y, beating estimates $69.15 billion
        • IPhone revenue $46.22 billion, +5.5% y/y, beating estimates  $45.04 billion, and an all time record for the company’s fiscal Q4.
        • Mac revenue $7.74 billion, +1.7% y/y, in line with estimates $7.74 billion
        • IPad revenue $6.95 billion, +7.9% y/y, missing estimates $7.07 billion
        • Wearables, home and accessories $9.04 billion, -3% y/y, missing estimate $9.17 billion
      • Service revenue $24.97 billion, +12% y/y, missing estimate $25.27 billion

    The one – very big – fly in the ointment was the usual suspect: China, where revenues unexpectedly dropped again, down 0.3% YoY:

    • Greater China rev. $15.03 billion, -0.3% y/y, missing estimate $15.8 billion

    Going down the line”

    • Total operating expenses $14.29 billion, +6.2% y/y, below estimates $14.35 billion
    • Cost of sales $51.05 billion, +4% y/y, above estimates $50.81 billion
    • Gross margin $43.88 billion, +8.5% y/y, above estimate $43.46 billion
    • Cash and cash equivalents $29.94 billion vs. $29.97 billion y/y, above estimate $26.04 billion

    And so on:

    Looking at a breakdown of sales by product category we find that revenue from the iPhone came in higher than expected, lifting overall revenue. It came in at $46.2 billion, beating estimates of $45 billion and growing over $1 billion year-over-year. Yet while Apple’s marketing engine around Apple Intelligence worked, the number came in somewhat shy of the more optimistic forecasts.

    The rest of the product suite was mixed with Mac revenue coming in line with est at $7.74bn, while both iPads and wearables missed expectations ($6.95BN vs exp. $7.07BN, and $9.04BN, vs exp. $9.17BN).

    • Macs came in with an about $100 million annual revenue increase, meeting Wall Street estimates of $7.7 billion. New Macs released this week should help that product segment in the current quarter. 
    • The iPad was a surprising miss, coming in just shy of $7 billion despite the release of the new iPad Pro and iPad Air models earlier this year. A new iPad mini released this month is unlikely to help materially.
    • Wearables, Home and Accessories was another disappointment, declining considerably and missing Wall Street expectations. There simply is not a lot of excitement in Apple’s wearables segment right now — and the new AirPods are now an early-adopter product that aren’t likely to generate much momentum in the fourth quarter.
    • The other concerning part about Wearables, Home and Accessories is that revenue continues to fall despite Apple launching a $3,500 device that is its first major new product category in a decade as part of the segment this year.

    As Bloomberg notes, the iPad and Wearables numbers “are pretty concerning” and it feels like the overall wearables segment for Apple is tapering –– but it’s worth noting two of the bigger drivers there (the Apple Watch Ultra and AirPods Pro) haven’t seen meaningful updates in two years.

    To be sure, it wasn’t all bad news: the fact that sales of iPhone — despite looking the same for half a decade and including little to no compelling upgrades over the prior few models — increased is a testament to Apple’s marketing might and brand strength. There are no signs of the iconic product slowing down.

    But, at some point, Apple is going to need to inject some innovative — not iterative — changes in order to once again stand out from the crowd. Apple is extraordinarily lucky that its competitors in the consumer electronics space are doing absolutely nothing to take advantage of the opportunity in front of them to outpace Apple.

    There was another disappointment: contrary to expectations for a modest rebound, China sales declined for a fifth consecutive quarter, down 0.3%, and printing at $15.03BN, below the $15.8BN estimate. The rest of the world saw growth, modest in the Americas at 3.9%, and stronger in Europe and APAC, both double digits.

    As Bloomberg notes, Greater China continues to be a weak spot for Apple and the company hasn’t done much to push new products, pricing and initiatives in that market — or other emerging areas — to offset the issues.

    The weakness there, which Apple will try to explain away in its conference call, is because of a combination of nationalism and interest in local products, whose designs are getting better. The local players are also trying new things like foldables while Apple continues to use the same design it rolled out five years ago.

    Still, while revenues have declined for 5 quarter, the modest upward movement in YoY sales is encouraging.

    Once again, Apple reached a new record in terms of its installed base of devices around the world. Yet with iPhone revenue ahead but China revenue missing, there’s a question: Did iPhone grow in China?

    And while we wait for the answer, there was more disappointment for AAPL because after wearables and China missed, so did Service revenue, which at $24.97BN, up 12%, came light of estimates $25.27BN.

    While services revenue was at an all-time record, the softness could become even softer in the future if governments continue to get their way and make Apple open up its App Store to alternative distribution and payment methods.

    Commenting on the quarter, CFO Luca Maestri said that “our record business performance during the September quarter drove nearly $27 billion in operating cash flow, allowing us to return over $29 billion to our shareholders. We are very pleased that our active installed base of devices reached a new all-time high across all products and all geographic segments, thanks to our high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.”

    Well at least the company is buying back stock hand over fist (it repurchased $25BN in the quarter), because shareholders are increasingly leery to do so. And speaking of blemishes, it is also worth noting that the dollar value for inventories in the quarter was around $900 million higher than the same period a year ago. Suppliers are a part of that: remember, Apple doesn’t make its own phones!

    Putting it together, these mixed results will affirm concerns among investors that Apple is losing its shine considerably in China while continuing to flood the market with products that consumers simply don’t find appealing, as well as devices that are only iterative tweaks from prior versions. And so far, nothing Apple has shown in terms of its AI technology has the look of a company that is set to own a core piece of that industry moving forward.

    Tyler Durden
    Thu, 10/31/2024 – 17:16

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